Many folks already use GMail’s 2.7-gigabyte-and-climbing capacity for storing large chunks of data. There’s even a freeware application called Gmail Drive, which makes your Gmail inbox appear as a drive folder in Windows.

Given the growing penetration of consumer broadband, Google and Microsoft apparently are willing to bet that online storage’s time has finally come. Don’t you just love competition?

A couple of days ago, I wrote about backup strategies for large quantities of data, like my bloated archive of DV25 video and digital photos. Today Dwight Silverman reports a story that I’ve been following with great interest: Google’s Gdrive…

I’d be interested to know what people are using these services for. My storage needs (for photos, video, etc.) run upwards of 30gb. And, at 384kbs upload speeds with Road Runner, this solution is not even close to being practical.

There are trusted services like IBackup that has been delivering the goods constantly for some time now. None other than PC World has rated it as the `best all-round backup service.’

The greatest advantage of using IBackup is that one of their applications called IDrive. IDrive can map your online IBackup account as a local drive on your computer and you can then drag-and-drop, open, edit and save files in it, as if they were on your computer. There is resumption of file transfer even after temporary disconnections. If you have to work with files like Access, Act! or Filemaker, IDrive Multimedia is the recommended application.

Similarly, backing up files and folders using IBackup for Windows is very fast and easy. It has options to let you view history of data stored in the last ten days with the Snapshots feature. The mirroring option will help you maintain the ‘absolute path’ of the source file.

No need to worry about multimedia files, as IBackup has a solution for it also. Simply move your music and video files to the IBackup account and play them in your favorite media player using IDrive Multimedia .

All communication using IBackup is secure with 128-bit SSL encryption. So there is absolutely no need to worry about data security.

The problem with IBackup is that it’s hideously expensive. They want $20 per month just to store 10 GB. Streamload will give you twice as much storage free. I have an archive of digital photos, slide and film scans, and DV video that’s over 500 GB. The largest plan IBackup lists is 200 GB and they want $400 per month for it! Even Amazon’s S3 storage is much cheaper than IBackup.

I buy a plan from Streamload that costs me about $50 per YEAR. It’s not as easy to use as IBackup, but it gives me essentially unlimited storage; I have about 600 GB stored there. If I ever need to recover all that data, I’ll have to pay a one-time fee of about $300 for the download bandwidth.

“All communication using IBackup is secure with 128-bit SSL encryption. So there is absolutely no need to worry about data security.”

This is meaningless unless the data is also encrypted on the IBackup servers.

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